I was born in a highly conservative and restrictive home. My parents had extremely inflexible definitions of right and wrong, good and evil, safe and unsafe. They also had strict beliefs on work—what it means, what is its purpose, what it should be like, and what we should expect from it.
I could say without a doubt that they were very wrong about most things. To them, work was about the pain and suffering. Being traditionalist Catholics, they thought that suffering in this life caused joy in the next. As such, they would do anything to live in penitence.
This included praying on their knees all afternoon, rejecting automation and comfort in the workplace, waking up very early, taking cold showers, dressing simple, ragged clothes, eating extremely modestly (avoiding seasonings and niceties like butter, yogurt, wine), and sleeping only barely enough hours to be just functional enough.
This way of seeing things and living life contradicted their earnings. My mother was a public servant in a state-owned telephonic company, so she made a lot of money. In Brazil, public jobs are, by far, the best paid and most stable of all jobs. My father also made more than enough money, though he barely finished high school.
As such, the only way they could justify that modest, ragged lifestyle was by pretending to be poor, and throwing most of their money away. They did it by building up and refurbishing their house over and over again: a two-store, five bathrooms, four bedrooms building with a pool table, a fully habitable attic, and fancy ass furniture. They even boasted two cars in the garage, and a fully stable paint shop.
So, they were extremely poor-looking and ragged, while living in a fancy, massive house. Though my mother always had her vacations and benefits granted by her excellent job, she always sold away her vacations and worked over-hours. I barely saw her in most of my childhood. My father, meanwhile, accepted humiliating agreements with his sneaky boss in order to work more and receive less. That way, he could ensure his penitence.
Needless to say, their health had always been terrible. For all my life, I observed my parents’ body and mind withering away. I remember their large purple bags underneath the eyes, their constant pains, sudden health problems like hernia and retina dislocation, my mother’s decades-long, untreatable bladder infection, my father’s incurable hemorrhoids, lower-back inflammation and reflux, and many other health issues that they hid from me, but I found out after spying on their phones and reading their conversations.
I described my parents like that because there is a surprising amount of people who are very similar to them. Belief drives action, and when belief is wrong, absurd, or twisted, action is harmful, stupid, and seemingly irrational. My parents’ belief led them to do whatever they could to suffer, and make me and my brother suffer as well.
For example, sometimes, I would get some kind of “gift” from my parents, like, they decided to pay my tuition. But, with them, nothing was free. They always played a theater of being dirt-poor, and so, they pretended that the money they were using to pay my tuition was coming out of the house’s food or something. They would then make some kind of “deal” with me, which always involved me working at my father’s shop.
From eight in the morning to seven in the afternoon, from Monday to Saturday, I would work there. In total, I would work fifty-seven hours every week. Sometimes I gained a bit of a salary (about 30% of a minimum wage). Sometimes, I gained a full salary, but no insurances whatsoever. A few times I gained nothing.
These were my father’s work hours, so he imposed them on me. I would even work during Christmas’ Eve. What kind of idiot buys paint on Christmas Eve, right? No one. The shop would stay open all day and not a single living soul would step in. But, my father made me open the shop anyway, because it wasn’t about selling stuff. It wasn’t about money. It was about penitence.
Every person needs to overcome absurd beliefs about work. Not all beliefs are religious in origin. My parents believed that work is penitence, and penitence gives a divine reward, but this is not so different than believing that “hard work will get you there,” the good old American Dream of pulling yourself by the bootstraps. It’s not different than believing that working quietly and gratefully all day, with the right mindfulness, will somehow make the universe attract good stuff for you.
All these ways of thinking are magical. Magical thought is all about cause and effect without causality. Like, when you throw a bit of salt over your shoulder to cast away bad energies… But, you don’t know how to explain why one thing causes the other. Why would throwing salt over the shoulder cast away bad energies? There’s no explanation. It’s pure magical thought.
The opposite of magical thought is a real examination of cause and consequence. For example, you can block harmful radioactive energy with a barrier of lead. Unlike blocking “bad energies” with an unrelated gesture, in this case you can prove that wearing lead really blocks radiation. You can even explain mathematically how much radiation is blocked based on the thickness of the lead barrier.
When people say that “if you work hard you’ll get there,” they never know how to explain why or how one thing causes the other. In practice, it rarely does. The value of a product or service is not influenced by how much work was put to make that product or fulfill the service. Any first year economics or marketing student knows that there are many factors involved in prices and values, like demand, perceived value, psychological value, and so on. But, the amount of effort put to create the product, or the suffering involved, does not increase the value.
You wouldn’t pay more for Coca-Cola if you knew that it was being hand-made by workers who spend ten hours a day moving levers around to mix the drink. Likewise, you can’t expect to make a higher salary by putting more effort and time in your work.
What my parents had about work was magical thinking. What many parents and adults in general have about most things in life are purely magical, because people don’t usually stop to think about causality in life. They follow common sense and don’t examine life.
That’s what causes the common sense that being a writer is not a job, and you can’t make money following this career.
The writer’s job is simple: sell books.
That’s how you become a professional writer.
You can be an amateur writer, of course, and write books. But, to be professional, you need to sell them, enough so that you’ll be able to pay your bills and have a dignified life with the money that they make.
How hard is it to sell books? What is the value of a book? That depends on the demand. If you’re writing books that have high demand, or if you somehow increase the demand for your name and your writing, you’ll sell more books and make more money. It’s simple. Some genres have higher demand. There’s also offer: if you’re in a genre with high demand, but there are hundreds of thousands of authors publishing for it, prices will not be as high. It’s all about demand and offer.
If you strip all magical thinking from work life, you’re left with crude, simple, market rules, not only to the profession of writer, but to any profession.
With magical thinking, an office worker will think that, by working harder, never saying “no” to the employer, pulling extra hours, and being blindly obedient, they will make more money—without really knowing how one thing causes the other. Without magical thinking, an office worker will think: how much demand is there for the work that I do? How much can I charge for it?
When you’re a teenager and you tell your parents and family members: “I want to be a writer,” most likely everyone will say: “This is absurd! Writers can’t make a living! Find a real job!”
They do this because they don’t understand how writing a book makes money. They don’t get how one causes the other. All they have is magical thinking: it works; it doesn’t; don’t know why. Like, when some people say, “You have to throw the salt over your left shoulder, instead of your right shoulder, otherwise it won’t work to cast away bad energies.” Cause and consequence are unrelated.
I write this because, over the years, my parents did everything and anything they could to prevent me from becoming a writer. They would bribe me, use emotional manipulation, use financial manipulation, sabotage my plans, and even threaten to throw me out in the streets if I kept trying to become a professional writer. My mother would throw away my typewriters and pens, throw away my notebooks, and try to break my computer by suddenly cutting power, all to make me give up. They didn’t comprehend how this could be a job. They wanted to know how I could suffer my proper penitences, and become deserving of Heaven, while working with something that didn’t demand almost sixty hours a week and that I actually loved to do.
I only became able to write professionally when I stripped away all magical thought about cause and effect. I began to look at the literary market as this: a market where readers look for books and authors sell them.
Will I write books that people want to buy? If so, I can become a professional writer. There’s nothing else to it.
There’s no magical formula, no super productivity hack that I need to figure out, no college course that I need, no crazy hours that I have to pull, no bulky classical books that I need to read, or theories that I need to study…
I only need to sit down and write books that are good and interesting. If I write with good enough commercial appeal, people will buy. If they buy, I make a living. That’s it. There’s nothing else.
That’s the writer’s job.
So, next time someone tells you that being a writer is not a good career, is not a job, and doesn’t make money, stop and think: does this person actually know if this is the case? Do they know any professional writers?
Or, are they simply repeating the old common sense, which is almost entirely based on magical thinking?